Blog Post by Hans De Visser (@Hans_de_Visser)

From my previous blog you may recall that I described how the cloud is a catalyst for innovation and differentiation by applying the principles of Mass Customization in IT.
I used the example of the Mini Cooper which’ personalization options give you that feeling like “hey… never seen this one before”, every time you come across one.

BTW: Mini doesn’t sponsor me, and I myself drive a pretty non-descript grey MPV. The concept just intrigues me and here is why:

Last week we held a webinar with John Rymer from Forrester and Uday Vijayan from Excel Software about Building and Delivering the next generation of cloud-enabled business solutions.

John Rymer started off describing the challenge of software developers (both at ISVs as well as in Enterprises) where 78% of them feel that the pressure of delivering faster and 79% feel that the pressure of delivering more has made work harder. One of the key reasons why cloud platforms are chosen is actually to deliver fast.

John continued to explain that faster time to market means two things: Fast delivery requires possibility of customization and prompt updates & changes must be “designed in”.

So if you’re building applications on a cloud platform it’s pretty key that the platform supports you with the options for continual improvement. Here’s the bullet-list that John shared with us on the webinar.

It strikes me that these eight options are all related to the question in how far SaaS applications can be tailored / customized / personalized without loosing the advantages of economies of scale and lower unit cost that come with the cloud.

In other words can I build “Mini Cooper” apps that have that appeal and the options for customization, personalization and tailoring the user experience at affordable cost?

Needless to say that the more support you get out-of-the-box from the cloud platform, the easier it will be for an ISV or Enterprise to take advantage of those options at minimal cost and burden.

So far the theory. Uday Viyayan, founder and CEO of Excel Software delivered the second part of the webinar, and it intrigued me that they are applying exactly these principles leveraging the Cordys platform.

Excel Software are based out of India and focus on building applications for Supply Chain Management, MRP and Finance. They started the journey to migrate their applications to Cordys as while ago and just recently launched one of their core applications called Medico Online as a SaaS application.

Uday explained how they were pushing the Cordys platform to the extremes to validate whether the concept that they wanted to apply could actually stand the test.

Medico Online deals with sales and distribution in the Pharmaceutical, Food and FMCG industries and many of Excel Software clients require seamless integration of Medico Online with their ERP back-end. For example: Excel built a single transaction on Cordys that could write more than 72 (!) transactions into the client’s global ERP system without compromising on any of the system controls – in fact, adding far richer domain specific functionality to the ERP. Here’s a picture of the approach that they took:

While explaining the concept using the picture above Uday unveiled a pretty interesting view on the architecture of the application. Rather than choosing a “classical” 3-tier architecture, Excel Software leverages the Cordys platform to build their applications in a 5-tier layer.

The three tiers of UI, Application Logic and Database are extended with a Process tier and an Integration tier. The two additional tiers are used as and when relevant, so you’re not forced into a straightjacket here.

The Process tier allows you to build in flexibility and collaboration by design, particularly when combined with business rules and business activity monitoring (option 3, 4, 5 & 6 from John’s list). The Integration tier supports you to establish seamless integration with other applications and or services from the cloud and on premise.

From a design time perspective we offer design artifacts for all the “tiers” in one integrated andbrowser based Collaborative Workspace (CWS).

The Collaborative Workspace also covers the application life cycle management aspects for deployment and upgrades of applications. Here’s where the other options (1, 2, 7 & 8 ) that John mentioned come to play.

Applications in Cordys are collections of various artifacts that are managed through the Cordys Application Packaging functionality in CWS. Application packages can be deployed on tenant-level or sub-tenant level (the latter are called organizations in Cordys).

Cordys supports organization-level styling and customizations, on the level of individual design artifacts. So this gives an ISV and Enterprises all the flexibility to do application configuration and personalization up to the level of schema extension while leveraging the standard application that is shared across organizations / tenants.

Cordys manages the dependencies within the standard applications and between the standard and customized artifacts on organization level, respecting those customizations during upgrades.

For Excel Software this translates to very tangible benefits. The CEO shared that Excel Software reduced TCO substantially and more importantly this approach has accelerated Time-to-Market by 5 times for the implementation time of their applications.

This is what I meant with the closing remark in my last blog that we’re seeing ISVs adopting this approach with great results. I encourage you to watch the on-demand webinar, which is available on the Cordys site. Click here to read more and watch the webinar.

I will unveil more of the platform secrets that enable speed to production and continual improvement options in a next blog about Cordys Cloud and the benefits of multi-level multi-tenancy.

Stay tuned.